corruption, decay, Vista Gateway laptop

This is a discussion on corruption, decay, Vista Gateway laptop within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; Hello,
I have a 2-3 year old Gateway laptop, with a default Windows Vista installation on it. I later put ...

corruption, decay, Vista Gateway laptop

Hello,
I have a 2-3 year old Gateway laptop, with a default Windows Vista installation on it. I later put Ubuntu on, no problem.
As soon as the second year of my having the computer, Vista started misbehaving as it relates to Windows Update. Finally, about a month ago, Vista was destroyed completely. I can still mount the partition and look at the files, but no recovery software out there can allow my Vista system to boot. It just crashes at bootup.
So, I contacted Microsoft and mentioned that my recovery partition had gotten destroyed as well (nice, right?). Ok, well I deleted the recovery partition. I'll be honest.
Anyway, they nicely agreed to send me a DVD so I could start Vista anew. That works for me.
But now my DVD/CD drive died! Augh! Done! Useless!

So, my question is, is there a way to set up my USB external hard drive to boot an image of the Vista installation DVD I expect to receive? Can this be done without removing the current contents from my USB hard drive?

No, Cyberfish, I do not. Although, that is worth looking for among friends. There's some stuff on google about using a flash drive. Perhaps I can transfer the information for using my USB hard drive. The trick will be making a bootable drive without formatting the thing. All of my data that I wish to save from Vista is on the drive I will be using to install Vista!